(For the more detailed guide for Ubuntu 9.10, which works much better for me, including suspend to ram, see here.)
This is just a really, really short basic howto for setting up the poulsbo X driver and VAAPI video acceleration on Ubuntu 10.04. I will post more details later.

If mplayer doesn't run because of missing libraries, this command will show which libraries are missing:
ldd mplayer-vaapi*/mplayer

Be quick, before the instructions change due to new repositories, libraries, etc... But don't everything to work flawlessly! My system doesn't even go into suspend, but crashes. Hence it can't come out of suspend, either. Backlight control still doesn't work for me. And I still have to do more testing on mplayer to see how smooth VAAPI actually is.

Theoretically, installing VLC 1.1.0 with VAAPI should be as easy as this:

4 comments:

I've been running Jolicloud, as it allows 100% driver support out of the box for every netbook(even Poulsbo GMA chipsets). However, I find that it is too dumbed down of an OS. It is reminiscent of an iPod touch's user interface.

I will have to give Ubuntu 10.04 a shot. Can I just install the latest Ubuntu and start right away on your guide? Or is there any other work I need to do before getting the GMA 500 (poulsbo) drivers working?

I'll stick with 10.04. 480p video works just fine on my MSI Wind u110 in Adobe Flash. I'm sure 720p will run just as smooth in HTML5. As for 1080p.... well, we have 1024x600 resolution monitors so who cares :P